We use administrative data from the Federal crop insurance program to examine how yield distributions change as farmers cycle into and out of the program. We are able to do this by linking many years of crop insurance data by individual farm conditioning observed yields on the particular county...

The first part of this paper presents a simple labor supply and production model wherein farmers with diminishing marginal utility of income derive nonpecuniary benefits from farming. We use the model to show how lump-sum or decoupled government payments could have positive and substantial...

Using a unique farm-level panel data set derived from three U.S. Agricultural Censuses, we estimate a Cox proportional hazard model to examine the effect of direct government payments on the survival of farm businesses, paying particular attention to the differential effect of payments across...

This study makes use of farm-level data from the Agricultural Census to evaluate the effects of the 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act, which intended to "decouple" commodity payments from production decisions. Prior to this Act, agricultural support payments were linked...

We use a large increase in Federal crop insurance subsidies as a natural experiment to identify the impact of risk on acreage and diversification decisions. Subsidy increases induced greater crop insurance coverage, which reduced farmers' financial risks. Did this change in the risk environment...